In her recent "Web 2.0 economy hangs in limbo" post, Caroline McCarthy gives her professional assessment of the frothy atmosphere of startup sponsored parties...

"...young women left and right were posing for photos with snappily-dressed Mashable overlord Pete Cashmore..."

That's Caroline on the right posing with Mr. Cashmore, for the record. Should have been "Young women like me..." Hell, why wouldn't you pose with the guy? Dude's a handsome fellow.

The article goes on to paint a picture of Web 2.0 companies being in trouble because of the economy, lack of business models, high burn rates. Sure, every company has to watch their wallets because of the economy, but lightweight companies built on Web 2.0 technologies are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the economic downturn.

For example, consider how much money the average company would save by switching to a free conference call provider--a provider using the latest technologies whose overhead is so low that they can afford to just make money off of giving the core product away for free and upselling for extra features.

Plus, people think that ridiculous schwag and wasted sponsorship dollars is limited to startups. I'm sorry, but has anyone been to a non-tech industry conference lately? How many people have sponsored bags, pens, squeezey stress shapes from companies already making millions in revenues and far past their venture capital burning days.

Perhaps my friend Caroline needs to spend more time at Ruby, PHP, MySQL, etc. users meetup, where developers are building great gamechanging applications instead of going to all the big flashy sponsored parties before making a generalization on the economic prospects of Web 2.0. Not all of us are handing out light sabres.